If you’re an agency looking to update your client’s strategy, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to navigate you through the process of conducting a strategy review.
Why might you want to create a strategy review?
We typically recommend that all clients within Hike review their strategy between 6-9 months after their initial strategy creation.
After 6-9 months, you have enough data to assess the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. You can measure changes in traffic, keyword rankings and conversions, allowing you to identify what is and isn’t working.
Providing your clients with a strategy review means they’ll always have fresh and up-to-date actions to complete, meaning they’ll get the most value possible from your services.
How to conduct a strategy review:
In the strategy review process, we’ll cover 4 different sections:
Keyword Strategy
Keyword trends can change over time. You may find that after 6-9 months, the search volume and difficulty of keywords have changed. You can use the strategy review as an opportunity to assess your client’s current keywords and find further opportunities.
Content Strategy
Fresh and relevant content is crucial for SEO. It’s therefore worthwhile analysing old or outdated content and creating a new content strategy to ensure relevant and fresh content is being published.
Competitor Strategy
In 6 months, competitors could likely have made changes to their strategy. It’s therefore worth analysing these changes and adjusting your strategy accordingly. This should help you to find new keywords and backlink opportunities for your client.
Backlink Strategy
Monitoring your backlinks will not only allow you to identify low-quality, spammy backlinks, but it’ll also help you assess whether you need to start building high-quality backlinks to improve your client’s SEO.
Keyword Strategy Review:
How are your keywords performing?
If you notice certain keyword rankings have decreased or stayed the same despite your best efforts to optimise for them, and a medium-low difficulty, you’ll want to take a further look. You may then be required to conduct further keyword research to find a better-suited keyword.
In this situation, it could be worth reassessing the assigned page to see if the keyword is better suited elsewhere. You may even decide that the keyword is no longer the best to optimise for the website.
Have you noticed changes in search volume and difficulty?
It’s good to assess whether search volumes and difficulties have changed. There’s a chance that over the last 6-9 months, they have. In this case, you’ll want to go through and assess whether you’re still optimising for the best keywords - those with a high search volume and low or medium difficulty.
Can you spot any potential cannibalisation?
There are a few signs that your client may be at risk of cannibalisation.
If you’re noticing that there’s a keyword which is ranking on a different page to the one you’re trying to optimise it for, or maybe if you’ve spotted very similar keywords assigned to different pages - you could be at risk of cannibalisation.
You’ll want to reassess these pages to determine whether or not you need to reassign keywords to maximise SEO performance and avoid cannibalisation.
Can you add any new pages to the keyword sitemap?
It could also be beneficial to check that all of the relevant pages on your client’s website have been added to the keyword sitemap. Are there any service or product pages that you’ve not yet added or found keywords for?
It’s also worth seeing if any new pages need to be created on the client’s website. Think about whether each service or product your client offers has its own page on their website.
Content Strategy Review:
Do you need to create some fresh blog titles?
If you haven’t built out a content strategy for your clients in 6-9 months, this is an important step to take. In order to optimise your website for SEO, you want up-to-date and relevant content. We’d recommend heading over to the content strategy in Hike and begin adding blog ideas to your Content Scrapboard that you can write and upload over the coming months.
Have you found blog ideas in the keyword filter?
A great way to find blog ideas and titles is by heading over to the keyword research section and clicking on ‘blog ideas’ in the filter. Here you should be able to find some more long-tail keyword blog ideas with a high search volume and low difficulty.
Have you created fake pages in the sitemap with your blog ideas?
To finish creating your content strategy, it could be worth creating ‘fake pages’ in the keyword sitemap. Here, you can add pages that haven’t yet been created - this will allow you to prepare for them and ensure that they’ll be completely optimised for SEO.
Have you added all previous blogs into the keyword sitemap?
It’s also essential that all of your past blogs are updated and optimised. Adding in previous blogs to the keyword sitemap will bring up actions related to these blogs to ensure they’re best optimised for your client.
Competitor Strategy Review:
How many competitors have you added into Hike?
You can add up to 15 competitors to Hike each month. We recommend that you make full use of this feature, and if you haven’t done so already, you should add in the most relevant competitors for your client. This will give you further insights and data around keyword ideas and backlinks within the platform.
Have you identified competitor backlink opportunities recently?
Within the ‘competitor opportunities’ section of Hike, we’d recommend taking a look through the backlinks your competitors have. If there are any backlink opportunities with a high domain authority, you can click ‘in progress’. This will collate all of the backlinks that should be built to help your SEO campaign.
Backlink Strategy Review:
How are your backlinks performing?
You’ll want to assess whether your backlinks are currently helping improve your client’s rankings. To do this, you’ll need to head to strategy > competitor analysis. Once here click on ‘compare competitors’ in the top left-hand corner.
Once you scroll down, you’ll be able to see how your backlinks are faring, as well as being able to compare your performance to competitors!
The main categories to focus on here are:
- Trust flow - A score based on the quality and relevance of your backlinks. The more relevant backlinks you have, the higher your trust flow.
- Citation flow - A score based on the quantity and popularity of your backlinks. The more popular the backlink, the higher the citation flow.
- Domain authority - A score given to you based on your citation and trust flow. The domain authority score is out of 10, with 10/10 being the best domain authority.
If you notice that your client’s domain authority score is low, a backlink strategy review could be needed.
Are you regularly assessing journalist outreach requests?
Adding in tracked keywords relating to your client’s business, services or products will allow you to identify journalist outreach requests best suited to your clients. We would then recommend looking through outreach requests every week to see if you can identify potential requests that would most suit your clients.
Are you finding competitor backlink opportunities?
As mentioned in the competitor strategy review section, you’ll want to identify any new, high-quality backlinks that your competitors have acquired. If you find a relevant opportunity with a high domain authority, you will then be able to add these to the ‘in-progress’ section and begin outreaching and proactively building backlinks.
Have you conducted a backlink health check?
As well as building new, high-quality backlinks, you also want to assess the backlinks currently linking to your client’s website. We’d recommend conducting a backlink health check as part of the strategy review to investigate how many spammy backlinks are linking to your client’s website.
Once you have identified these websites in the strategy review, you will be able to go ahead and disavow them.